Month: January 2023

Enlarge / The Nicobar pigeon, the dodo's closest living relative, is quite a bit smaller and capable of flight. (credit: Samuel Hambly / EyeEm)

Colossal is a company that got its start with a splashy announcement about plans to do something that many scientists consider impossible with current technology, all in the service of creating a product with no clear market potential: the woolly mammoth. Since that time, the company has settled into a potentially viable business model and set its sights on a species where the biology is far more favorable: the thylacine, a marsupial predator that went extinct in the early 1900s.

Today, the company is announcing a third de-extinction target and its return to the realm of awkward reproductive biology that will force the project to clear many technical hurdles: It hopes to bring back the dodo.

A shifting symbol

The dodo was a large (up to 1 meter tall), flightless bird that evolved on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. As European sailors reached the islands, it quickly became a source of food for them and the invasive species that accompanied them. It went extinct within a century of the first descriptions reaching Europe.

Enlarge / ChromeOS will feature better OneDrive and Microsoft 365 support "later this year." (credit: Google)

Google and Microsoft don't always take pains to make sure their products work great together—Google originally declared Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser "not supported" by the Google Drive web apps; Microsoft is always trying to make you use Bing—but it looks like Google's ChromeOS will start working a bit better with the Microsoft 365 service later this year.

Google says ChromeOS will add a "new integration" for Microsoft 365, making it easier to install the app and adding built-in support for OneDrive in ChromeOS' native Files app. This should allow users to search for and access OneDrive files the same way they get to local files, or files stored in their Google Drive account. The integration will be added in "the coming months," and users in ChromeOS' dev and beta channels will be able to access it before it rolls out to all ChromeOS users later this year.

ChromeOS users can currently access OneDrive and other Microsoft 365 services through their web interfaces or Android apps installed via the Google Play Store, but they don't integrate with the built-in ChromeOS Files app the way that Google Drive does. This integration will help close that gap for people who, for example, use Google products at home but Microsoft products at work or vice versa.

Enlarge (credit: Lenovo )

Smart displays have struggled to gain a foothold in a saturated market. Even an old smartphone or tablet can give the best smart displays a run for their money. From the Facebook Portal videoconferencing display and Amazon Echo Show 15 to Samsung's series of desktop-sized smart monitors, companies have been trying to find a purpose that sticks. The next effort is Lenovo's 27-inch ThinkView Plus. It attempts to find a niche for smart displays for business purposes but does so with a limiting focus on Microsoft Teams.

Announced at Information Systems Europe conference in Barcelona today, the ThinkView Plus is two parts videoconferencing display, one part USB-C monitor.

On the monitor side, you get decent connectivity options—one HDMI, one DisplayPort in and out, two USB-A ports, and one USB-C (versions not specified). However, at 1920×1080 resolution and a pixel density of only 81.6 pixels per inch, you're not going to get the type of image quality you might expect from the price tag alone. Lenovo hasn't specified the ThinkView Plus' panel type or other related specs.

Enlarge / The regional headquarters of Samsung in Mountain View, California. (credit: Getty Images/Smith Collection)

Samsung Electronics has a big phone launch this week, but before that happens, let's check in on the company's last quarter. Following the trend of the industry as a whole, Samsung's earnings seem like a disaster.

For Q4 2022, the company's revenue—down to 70.5 trillion won ($57.3 billion), or an 8 percent drop from Q4 2021—doesn't look too bad. Q4 profits plummeted 69 percent year over year, though, down to 4.3 trillion Korean won, or $3.5 billion. That's an eight-year low, going back to Q3 2014,

Samsung Electronics makes just about every electronic device and every part you'd find in one of those devices—phones, tablets, TVs, laptops, memory chips, SoCs, displays, camera sensors, and batteries—so the company's earnings will always go the way the general economy goes.

Enlarge / Say so long to the original PSVR's glowing blue lights. (credit: PlayStation Blog)

Sony is drastically scaling back its sales expectations for next month's launch of the PlayStation VR2 headset, according to a Bloomberg report citing "people familiar with [Sony's] deliberations."

The PlayStation 5 maker now expects to sell just one million PSVR2 units by the end of March, down from sales expectations of 2 million units in that period, as reported last October. Sony expects to sell about 1.5 million more headsets in the following fiscal year, which ends in March 2024, according to the report.

The scaled-back sales expectations would put the PSVR2 slightly ahead of the pace set by the original PSVR headset, which sold just under a million units in its first four months and 2 million units in just over a year. But that kind of sales pace looks less impressive today, when a headset like the Meta Quest 2 can sell a reported 2.8 million units in its first quarter, on its way to total sales of over 15 million, according to market analysis firm IDC.

Enlarge / US President Joe Biden speaks to members of the media on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. (credit: Getty | Chris Kleponis/Bloomberg)

President Joe Biden plans to end two national emergency declarations over the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, which will trigger a restructuring of the federal response to the deadly coronavirus and will end most federal support for COVID-19 vaccinations, testing, and hospital care.

The plan was revealed in a statement to Congress opposing House Republicans' efforts to end the emergency declarations immediately.

“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system—for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy.